Star Trek Phase II

Bloody hell.

“To Attain the All” has got to be the worst episode of Star Trek Phase II by *far*. “Cassandra” was bad. “The Child” was awful. “Savage Syndrome” was appalling, but that was by Margaret Armen, so that’s par for the course. And nobody really expected greatness from “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?”: A brief like that is angling for major problems from the outset. But this? Wow. There’s no excuse for this.

While investigating a system of planets strung together like a pearl necklace (so *that’s* where Star Trek: Year Four got the idea from. Seriously, how do you screw up a visual like that?), the Enterprise is suddenly transported to a realm outside normal spacetime where they are visited by a hyper-evolved energy being called The Prince who claims to represent an infinitely old culture who hold the secrets of the universe, and declares he’s going to test the crew to determine whether or not they’re worthy of attaining a form of enlightenment called “The All” (and it should be an indication for how bloody long this show has been going on that a brief like that feels hackneyed and boring). The Prince says he wants two representatives to face a series of challenges, to which Decker and Xon immediately volunteer for their own reasons (Xon thinks it’s logical, while Decker is starry-eyed at the prospect of learning and new discovery). Reluctantly, Kirk agrees, but at the same time begins to work with Uhura and Ilia to find a way to free the Enterprise.

After that bit, Decker and Xon go off to rainbow space land to play Legends of the Hidden Temple. They are faced with a series of puzzles and physical challenges they must overcome by using a combination of logic and intuition to progress to the next stage and reach The All while The Prince occasionally pops in to give them advice. You thought I was kidding. I wish I was. While this is going on, Kirk begins to notice that the remainder of his crew are starting to act disturbingly similar to each other: McCoy and Chapel are having a professional disagreement, but then start to see each other’s points, Sulu is starting to display character traits more associated with Chekov and vice versa, and Uhura and Ilia are starting to speak for each other. Eventually, this culminates in the entire crew, save Kirk and Decker, becoming subsumed by The All, which turns out to be a great big ancient hive mind that goes around assimilating other people, so naturally the two manly action heroes have to go and punch some sense into everyone and aggressively re-introduce them to good ol’ American Individuality.

Christ on a bike.

Where do I begin? The All is self-evidently enlightenment, obviously coded as a Buddhist version of it to boot…and the show thinks this is an evil, horrible thing. Idiotic and embarrassing children’s gameshow trappings aside, this is the fundamental problem with this episode. It dwarfs everything else and puts Star Trek into a dangerous position the likes of which it hasn’t ventured near for at least twelve years.…

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Well, the first thing I have to say is that this episode isn’t as bad as I was led to believe it was going to be given the description, and especially considering the source material. But it’s also pretty tough to call “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” an especially good idea in the first place: When the best thing that can be mustered to say is that “It’s not as irreparably catastrophic as it could have been”, that’s not exactly praise either.

The imminent problem is that “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” was apparently based on the novel The Revolt of Man, which was an 1882 dystopian story about a society ruled by dominant, aggressive women who crush and subjugate the passive and weak men. Naturally, this results in the end of all scientific and technological progress, because that’s “men’s work” and women are incapable of properly handling it. So, the men stage a massive planetwide revolution to restore the “proper order” of things, in the first time I have ever cheered *against* an oppressed minority rising up and overthrowing their oppressors. There is no possible way adapting this book into a Star Trek story could ever conceivably be seen as anything remotely resembling a good idea, even to a creative team *this* tone deaf. And yet, here it is. That Worley Thorne somehow manages to avoid the somewhat unthinkable feat of unseating Margaret Armen as the single most hatefully reactionary writer in the entirety of Star Trek is nothing short of a small miracle, yet that doesn’t make “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” something to get terribly excited about either.

Star Trek Phase II‘s “twist” on this story is that the alien planet is not ruled by women, but is in fact made up entirely of hermaphrodites who have both male and female hormones. The society they build is basically a stock-reiteration of the Talosians from “The Cage”, honing their powers of illusion and their “mental abilities” in lieu of developing more and better material technoscience. Apparently though, their bodies can’t manufacture the male hormones naturally, and either both or specifically the male ones are needed to control their illusory powers, so, in a scene reminiscent of “The Lorelei Signal” (which isn’t a good sign), they’ve been luring starships to their planet so they could supplant their chemical deficiency by harvesting from their crews. There’s also something about the illusions causing people to regress in age and be hypnotized and something else about the Enterprise being in a deteriorating orbit and needing dilithium crystals that the previous ship left behind and that the aliens are hiding for some reason or another, but I literally did not care enough to go back and check.

The sad thing is this is once again a really great episode for the new characters: There’s more anxiety over Xon’s youth and inexperience, Chekov is in full swing in his new role as security chief/tactical officer and even Janice Rand is back, for the first time since “In Thy Image”, and gets to join the away team early on.…

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It’s Margaret Armen again. That’s really all you need to know.

It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect Margaret Armen-penned Star Trek Phase II to be: Almost comically terrible, offensive and unworkable drivel that largely misses the entire point of the show. So structurally unsound as to actually become some kind of cosmic anti-structure and loaded up with the most unforgivably ghastly racism and misogyny you can think of, “Savage Syndrome” is without question the worst episode of the show to date. No contest. It’s also probably her very worst submission overall, which wow, we’re really hitting record lows here.

There’s no point in any kind of summary, but basically, the Enterprise gets hit with a space mine that “reverts” the crew to a “primitive”, “animalistic” mindset, all save for an away team comprised of Decker, Ilia and McCoy, conveniently the three crewmembers who could most easily resolve the plot at the end of the episode, who were conveniently off exploring a derelict spaceship and conveniently decided to use a shuttlecraft so they wouldn’t have to be beamed back aboard (no, the script does not explain why they just happened to decide to use a shuttlecraft on the precise mission where it was absolutely vital that they do so). And of course, Armen’s conception of “animal instinct” is the absolute worst it could possibly be, firstly totally misunderstanding how gender roles manifest in real life animals by embracing the patriarchal assumption that female animals are always submissive breeding stock for alpha males and the appallingly racist notion that evolution is linear and that indigenous cultures are closer to animals and thus more “primitive” and “savage”. I can’t even muster up the energy to get righteously angry at this shit anymore. It just sucks. That this evil, reactionary, talentless hack is still getting paid writing gigs in fucking 1978 is beyond belief. Fuck this.

(Ironically, in spite of all of this, “Savage Syndrome” is, somewhat horrifyingly, Decker and Ilia’s best outing yet. Both get really sizeable and important parts and carry the majority of the episode’s narrative weight, given that everyone else save McCoy is incapacitated. Ilia in particular is quite good: She does manage to get kidnapped a couple times, but she frees herself, and she uses her “Deltan powers of sensuality” to manipulate the male crewmembers because of course she does, but she runs all over the ship rerouting power and just generally fixing things and, scary as it is, this is her best episode to date.)

As it would be terrible for my patience, temper, mood and general mental well-being to do so, what I’d rather do instead of meticulously going through this episode’s litany of flaws is to talk about the story’s underlying assumption. This would be, in an attempt to strip away as much of the hideous racism as is possible, the idea that simplifying one’s life is tantamount to being retrograde, going against the idea of progress. The affected crewmembers, for example, do not know how to use the modern technology of the Enterprise and resort to fashioning basic implements out of metal rods and bars.…

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“Deadlock” is incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, it’s the first Star Trek episode to deal overtly with the dark side of the Federation and Starfleet, but on the other hand it’s not because it doubles-back on itself and refuses to actually fully commit to the accusations it levels and issues it raises. It opens seemingly promising to make explicit a lot of the implicit concerns and reservations we’ve held about Star Trek from the very beginning, but because of its ultimate balking and painfully bog-standard climax and conclusion, it actually ends up feeling less satisfying and critical then previous efforts.

Answering a distress signal from the USS Intrepid (no, not that one) in “Uncharted Region 019”, the Enterprise is suddenly and inexplicably called away to Starbase 7, leaving Kirk suspicious and Decker enraged. Upon arrival, a Commodore Hunter informs Kirk that he called the Enterprise away to participate in a series of top-secret Starfleet psychological experiments. The crew’s first assignment is to shut down all power to the ship and await further orders from behavioural scientist Lang Cardon. Troubled, Kirk asks Scotty and Xon to come up with an algorithm that would allow them to take the ship from a cold stop to mission stations at the first sign of danger.

While powered down, the crew experiences a series of hypnotic, flashing psychedelic images. The crew becomes entranced, with the exception of Xon and Ilia, who have altogether different and disturbing experiences. Afterwards, Xon tells Kirk that he and Ilia had visions of grave danger, and a message: “Enterprise, you must escape! Report to Starfleet…A plot-Cardon is…”.After learning Cardon’s experiments had been suspended some months prior with no official explanation given, the crew decides to investigate the starbase themselves. Kirk beams over to check things over for himself, instructing Decker to wait an hour, at which point, if Kirk hasn’t checked in, he’s to seize and secure Starbase 7, using any means necessary.

While “Deadlock” initially seems like it’s going to be a deconstruction and criticism of Starfleet ethics and operational structure, what it in practice turns out to be is another of Star Trek’s semi-regular “let’s try and do a current events story” type of episodes. This time, it’s Star Trek’s stab at Project MKUltra, which was a series of CIA experiments looking into the feasibility of controlling human behaviour through various stimuli. From in the 1953 to 1973, Project MKUltra tested a whole suite of techniques running the gamut from illegal to unethical to completely ridiculous, such as sexual abuse, torture, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and, most famously, clandestinely dropping LSD into random people’s drinks to see if the ensuing acid trips could be used as a form of mind control. Some historians believe the endgame of Project MKUltra was to create a kind of mentally servile supersoldier, while others posit the theory that the more out-there experiments were deliberately emphasized by the CIA to draw attention away from its real purpose, which, according to this theory, was to find more effective means of that favourite government buzzword: “Enhanced interrogation”.…

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“Practice in Waking” is an interesting submission. It’s written by Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This is not, in and of itself, altogether promising, considering Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a cornerstone of the middlebrow, populist, mystique-chic New Age movement with a plot so dull and facile it led Roger Ebert to once memorably compare it unfavourably to The Little Engine That Could. There’s a very serious line to be drawn between actual magick, narrative or otherwise, and the kind of thing championed by the Western, and mostly United States, New Age fad, which more often than not tends to be built out of the exact same imperialism, syncretism and cultural appropriation that defines the rest of the West. If Star Trek wants to take its spirituality seriously, it really ought to stay as far away from this kind of thing as possible. Clearly, “Practice in Waking” is screaming towards disaster.

And, wouldn’t you know it, this is could possibly be the best episode yet. Funny thing that.

“Practice in Waking” opens up hauntingly prescient, very strongly evoking Star Trek: The Next Generation, in particular the first season finale “The Neutral Zone”: Out in deep space, the Enterprise discovers a derelict spaceship called Project Long Chance, one of the last sublight ships built by Earth in the early 21st century. After Xon exposits that the crew must have been placed in suspended animation, Decker takes an away team, consisting of himself, Scotty and antiques buff Sulu over to the Long Chance, where they find one active unit: The casket of chief engineer Deborah MacClintock. Before they can fully relay their findings to the bridge crew, Scotty accidentally touches a panel on MacClintock’s chamber, generating a massive pulse of energy that knocks the away team out and places them in instantaneous suspended animation.

Decker, Scotty and Sulu awake in sixteenth century Scotland in the middle of a forest. Having no memory of who they are and where they came from, they scarcely have time to get their bearings before they see a woman, MacClintock, who is being chased by a royal garrison and about to be put on trial for witchcraft. As the away team fights off the guards, MacClintock reveals that she does in fact believe herself to be a witch, because she has the power to dream events and objects into reality and declares that they too must be witches as well. Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, Kirk, McCoy, Xon and Uhura work feverishly to find out what’s happened to the away team and to find a way to safely wake them, for as long as they stay in a coma, their life signs will deteriorate, to the point they have only hours to live. Curiously, this parallels with events in the “dream world”, as pursued and eventually captured by the witch hunters, MacClintock, Decker, Sulu and Scotty only have hours before they’re burnt at the stake for witchcraft.

Right away, this is once again an episode that’s both structurally very sound and ahead of its time.…

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Theodore Sturgeon is an obvious pick to write for Star Trek Phase II. He wrote one of the most beloved and influential Original Series episodes ever, “Amok Time”, so it would make sense to give him the opportunity to make something equally memorable for Phase II. However, the thing about Sturgeon is that he *also* wrote “Shore Leave”, which was such a hot mess it was possibly the only work of fiction in the history of time to be actually improved by getting a retread sequel. So, would “Cassandra”, Sturgeon’s submission to Star Trek Phase II, channel the grandiose brilliance of “Amok Time” or the misogynistic clusterfuck of “Shore Leave”?

Naturally, it had to be the misogynistic clusterfuck.

“Cassandra” is pegged as a “comedy”, which is already a bad sign because Star Trek sucks at comedy unless Gene Coon and Dave Gerrold are writing, and neither of them are in this case. The Enterprise is monitoring a diplomatic conference on the planet Manlikt (an aside, here’s a stock Star Trek theme that gets more pronounced in Star Trek: The Next Generation that I never understood: Why is the Enterprise crew frequently put in charge of hosting diplomatic conferences? Aren’t they supposed to be explorers? Isn’t this the job of ambassadors?) between the warlike native peoples the Manlikt (great names) and the Breet. It seems to have gone smoothly at first, but no sooner does the conference wrap up than the Manlikt make a planetwide declaration that they will detonate a doomsday device if the Breet do not return their Sacred Monitor, a priceless Manlikt cultural artefact that seems to have gone missing.

As the bridge crew try to figure that out, our “heroine”, a young, fresh-faced and exceptionally clumsy Yeoman named Myra Kart stops by sickbay to give McCoy and Chapel a strange alien egg she found, but that she also managed to drop and crack. The egg hatches into a small, fuzzy bird-like thing named Cassandra, who seems to have the ability to parrot people’s words before they say them. Cassandra then escapes, and the rest of the episode pretty much consists of Kart chasing her all over the ship as she causes all manner of wacky and whimsical mischief while Kart runs into walls, pushes the wrong buttons and just generally wrecks shit and acts like a dumbass. Eventually, she manages to accidentally capture some Breet spies after Xon reveals to Kirk what everyone who wasn’t asleep figured out forty-five minutes ago, that Cassandra is the Sacred Monitor, was stolen by the Breet and hidden aboard the Enterprise and must be returned to Manlikt. Apparently, somewhere in all of this is there’s supposed to be humour.

Wow. I haven’t seen an episode this manner of bad in quite awhile. This is the sort of thing that defines *painfully* bad: It’s physically difficult to watch because of how awkward, stilted and forced it is and how completely it lacks any manner of self-awareness of just how badly wrong and embarrassing it’s gone.…

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It makes sense that one of the first things Star Trek Phase II would attempt would be a revisit of a major Original Series story, theme or motif. In fact, it makes even more sense here than it did in the context of Star Trek: The Animated Series: That show was pegged as more or less a continuation of the Original Series, tweaking and revising it where necessary. It also only came five or six years after “Turnabout Intruder” fist aired, whereas “In Thy Image” came a decade afterwards and into a very different cultural landscape. The world, not to mention Star Trek itself, has changed, and Star Trek Phase II has to update itself accordingly.

It also, though I hate to admit it, makes sense that the first such story, and the first regular episode to air after the pilot, would be a revisit of “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Much as I despise it, it’s without question the most popular and iconic episode of the Original Series and usually considered the very best, or at least it is if you’re pretentious and joyless enough to turn your nose up at “The Trouble with Tribbles”. You’d want to kick off your new show with something that reminds people of the old show’s highlights, while also demonstrating that you’re now capable of improving on them. So, doing an episode inspired by and very much like “The City on the Edge of Forever” is eminently logical.

The thing about “Tomorrow and the Stars” though, is that it’s not *like* “The City on the Edge of Forever”, it *is* “The City on the Edge of Forever”. In that episode, a dangerous ailment plagues one of the crew leading to an accidental time travel incident where Kirk ends up in mid-20th century Earth, where he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be involved in a major world event that cannot be altered for fear of changing history, so Kirk must let her die to preserve the timeline. In this episode…a dangerous ailment plagues one of the crew leading to an accidental time travel incident where Kirk ends up in mid-20th century Earth, where he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be involved in a major world event that cannot be altered for fear of changing history, so Kirk must let her die to preserve the timeline…

Oh sure, the details are fudged around with a bit: In “City…” Kirk ends up in the 1930s and his paramour is a social worker who will bring about the downfall of civilization with her radical and dangerous idea that maybe bombing the shit out of each other isn’t the best approach to world politics, while in “Tomorrow…” he ends up in the 1940s (and, of interest to me and this blog, Hawai’i) and his lady friend happens to have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Namely, Pearl Harbour on December 6, 1941 Also, Kirk is translucent for reasons that are never really explained and which serve no purpose to the story.…

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